On Monday 24 March 2008 10:06:33 Ian McDonald wrote:
<flame><rant>
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:28 PM, Graham Lauder <yorick_(a)openoffice.org> wrote:
On Saturday 22 March 2008 10:03:48 Ian McDonald wrote:
Update on what is in this: http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html
To me it looks like features Office has had for years.....
Many opensource projects innovate and I think it is time they did this rather than copy.
Many times we get these comments on the lists and because of my "position" within OOo I have to bite my lip. Here though I'll take the moment to have a good old rant.
And I'll take the chance to respond as well. My statement was short and was a generalisation but I still stand by it. It was referring to the "major" new features in OO 3 - and those features have been in MS Office for a while mostly and are almost identical.
<rant>
Frankly Ian, I expected better of you.
Why do you expect better of me? Is it because: - I have been president of WLUG? - because I have code merged in the Linux kernel and several other projects? - because I am advocating open source software (include OO) to CIOs who run around 40,000 desktops and large number of servers? And I have converted some of these already - including OO. - because I have been playing with open source office tools such as Abiword, Gnumeric, Koffice, Staroffice since the 1990s? - because I have been setting open standards by being on working groups on the IETF?
So even though I am passionate about open source I should not express my opinions?
Hell no, opinionate away, just expect a response is all :). How I expected better is because of all of the above. Just simply saying "it looks like features Office has had for years....." and "it is time they did this rather than copy." is somewhat unfair when you above many others, should know better the limitations under which we labour. Would that we had a tenth of the resources that MSO gets thrown at it. If I could get every corporate who uses OOo to contribute one developer even part time to the project, wow the difference that would make. I would love it if all the people who jumped on the lists asked us to "Innovate", but they don't, we get same old refrain about "compatibility"
MS have PDF export,
That's news to me, I was under the impression that this was only a third party implementation
forms support (not PDF but in many ways better)
We'll agree to disagree on this, but then I haven't had that much experience with Office 07, I can't justify the expenditure and the only copy in the house is on my Wife's Laptop, paid for (or not?) by Waikato Uni for staff comps. [....]
Business is saying "F**k innovation let me do work faster and more efficiently" and in the majority of business cases OOo will allow you to do just that. Give me any group of Office staffers for a day and I will prove it. Will they change? Some will, some won't, some believe they have to get their boss to spend thousands of licensing dollars to get a product that will do the job for them and that something for free can't be any good so they don't give it a second glance. Others want their bosses to spend thousands on them because it makes them feel valued so using a zero license cost product is a nono. Others are open to change and are amazed when they see what OOo can do for them.
And in this regards OO actually has a major advantage as there is less training going from Office 2003 to OO then from Office 2003 to Office 2007. However if you get away from looking at what is easiest for the user in the short term there are major benefits in Office 2007 or OO.
Agreed, and much of my Corporate migration training work is from Office 97, in those circumstances the shift is pretty big also but probably comparable for both OOo and MSO 07.
OOo 3.0 will support Office "Open" xml, point out to me, if you will, where MS Office supports ODF.
OOo 3 is a free upgrade from 2.X or even 1.X, has MS taken hold of this innovation.
Introduce to me if you will to a simple enduser who got a feature included in MS Office, I can do that easily for OOo.
Yes I do know of instances.
There is innovation all through OOo that people simply ignore. It was OOo and it's corporate partners that launched and promoted the idea of a fully open Document Format that anyone could use. It was OOo and the corporate partners that got that adopted as an ISO standard, something that MS is desperately trying to emulate (and badly I might add)
And I think Microsoft is trying to do the same with OOXML although not so well in some areas, but better in other areas. Microsoft moved down this path also due to market and technological pressures just as OO did.
MS could have achieved the same result by simply getting behind ODF and putting in an "Save to ODF" feature in MSO 07 that would have saved them all the grief they're getting at the moment, personally I think they didn't do it because they don't have the ability, but that's for different discussion. [......]
I do hope Microsoft will move further down this than their tentative steps. I do believe that Microsoft has innovated more than most other players though. The exception to this is probably in the areas of security, reliability and performance on the server where GNU/Linux has led the way for quite some time.
I doubt that MS will ever move down the OSS track and I believe that they will be stymied by a lack of will and a lack of ability to work with OSS. Their poking toes in the water approach to this has been little more than a PR exercise designed to appease their critics. Appease and Stall, appease and stall. An old MS tactic, the leopard has not changed his pyjamas
</rant>
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. :) At the Sydney LCA I talked with Joe Brockmeier about marketing OOo and he made the point that in terms of the Linux market OOo is at saturation and there is a level of negative feeling toward the "Big Kid" in the sand pit and it's true that I constantly find myself defending OOo from people in the Linux community who should be core support.
The reason for attacks on OO is that it is big and ugly and cumbersome - both in footprint and codebase. KOffice seems far more the innovator and maybe Gnome will get there as well. My feeling about OO is that it still hasn't been tidied up from it's original propiertary code base and will suffer until it does so. Mozilla had the same issue for many years with the Netscape codebase and I hope OO gets there too.
Yep I've heard all of that and I disagree with most all of it except the bit about Gnome. OOo has progressed and is progressing on many fronts, but it's never as fast as many want. KOffice does some things really well and I hope to see them continue to grow and get better. I'm an old Star Office user from the days of SO 5 so I know how OOo has changed. I hate comparing Mozilla to OOo but people keep doing it. So let me put this straight. Firefox is sexy, Browsers are sexy and can be made to look sexy. The code is light and it is uses open standards to display webpages. It's a display tool, that's it, with some limited creative ability. It's like comparing a Photo Album to a typewriter. The only similarity between OOo and Mozilla is that they are Open Source Projects.
I think the other reason for attacks is that people see the potential and yet despite the many $s poured in by Novell, Sun,
Still only a fraction of the money pumped into MSO
IBM that it is yet to reap the dividends it should.
Hmmm IBM certainly says it does, but other than some CJK localisation stuff I'm unaware of anything that they've contributed. They're good at taking, not so good at giving back. However I'm willing to be corrected on that.
I think this springs from lack of strong leadership personally - quite different from the Linux kernel, KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu etc.
KDE is always criticised for trying to look like windows, Gnome that it doesn't allow for User choice. My opinion of Ubuntu is extremely low if only for the bad screwing with OOo that they do and the fact that OOo gets blamed because the marketing has the world convinced that Ubuntu can do no wrong and a large chunk of the Linux community has swallowed it HL&S. Frankly Yoper is a much better distro than Ubuntu and it's our own. Love to have Canonical marketing dollar and muscle. However Ubuntu still doesn't have the same market penetration as OOo. If our leadership is so bad how can this be. Personally I would line Simon Phipps, Louis Suarez- Potts and Matthias Bauer against any opensource leaders any day. And that's not to say I'm just a fanboy I've had some battles with all of them over my time with OOo.
We have a problem finding developers because of the sheer size of the beast and the sometimes complex relationship between the corporate partners and the larger community. (If anyone knows the Kohei's Solver Soap Opera you'll know what I mean) It is easy for a developer to disappear amongst the sheer mass of code which is why there has been such a thrust behind UNO and extension development.
We have a problem being No2, no matter how hard we try to do otherwise, we have to spend far too much developer time on unproductive compatibility issues and feature copying while the truly great enhancements get ignored.
While GNU/Linux, Firefox, Apache etc manage to cope well with this... And now others are trying to be compatiable with them e.g. IE8
The comparison doesn't fly sorry and the above statement is nonsense. GNU Linux has a fraction of the desktop share that OOo does and it can't even write reliably to NTFS yet, hardly what I'd call compatible and certainly nowhere near the same level of interoperability that OOo has achieved with it's MS competitor Firefox doesn't have any real competition. In terms of functionality it is far better than the MS example but only because MS just stopped Development on IE. If MS stopped development on MSO for 5 years we'd have a larger chunk of the market as well. Additionally Firefox works with Open Standards that IE is also required to work with, not some arbitrary binary dump that MS feels fit to call a file format that devs are required to back engineer to be "compatible and interoperable" Jeez given the lead that MS handed them I can't understand why FF doesn't have 80% of the market share. Apache has no real competition on a direct price per feature basis and it is a product exclusively used by Tech Savvy users and simply a tool for moving people around a network and displaying files.that's comparing apples with compost. Of the significant OSS desktop Projects, the most comparable are Abiword, Gnumeric, inkscape and the GIMP. All manipulate data and produce documents in a desktop environment operated by often Non sophisticated End Users. None of the above have the same market penetration in their field as does OOo
This donkey work stuff gets done by the paid developers at SUN, Novell and so forth. The whole idea behind UNO and extensions development is to let the community contribute the innovation. Have a look at what is available at http://extensions.openoffice.org and you'll see what I mean, the extensions project is fairly new but some of what is coming out of there is great.
Yes and Sun, Novell and IBM end up with quite different codebases due to the code structure. Novell OO is not the same as Sun OO and IBM have bastardised it and called it Symphony.
Symphony is based on OOo 1.1.X code, it doesn't count because it was made available under another license that wasn't GPL based. It's just an update of the old Workplace. IBM have contributed nothing back to the core code. Too bad, because I liked the tabbed document interface. With the change to the LGPL and the dropping of the SISSL license with the 2.0 launch, IBM couldn't use that code without having to make the source code available, so they just kept hacking at the old 1.1.X code and hence Symphony. That's why the the IBM code is different, it's just a hack of obselete code and moving to the 2.X codebase would require them to release their version under the LGPL. The SISSL was more like the BSD license Novell's Version is only different in small ways and only because Novell patches get accepted into their version obviously faster than it goes to the core code. There is some division on the VBA filters but when the Java guys and the Novell guys agree on a compromise between their two solutions we'll see that in OOo as well. But for the most part the two builds are identical and code is toing and froing all the tiime
It's no good saying that OOo doesn't innovate unless you have made an effort to do something about that, because you in fact are the community, we all are that consider ourselves part of Open Source.
Yes I have done my part - including promoting OO, bug reporting/testing OO. I also have opinions which I think are worth expressing.
Won't get any argument from me on that, just expect to be corrected if the someone thinks the opinions are ill informed, unfair or just plain wrong. :D
NB opionions are my own only etc
Understood Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html INGOTs Moderator New Zealand www.theingots.org.nz GET DRESSED : GET OOOGEAR Gear for the well dressed OOo Advocate www.ooogear.co.nz